Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu

Professor

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Hi! Our group conducts research in machine learning. Our approach is mathematical and formal, but we also have fun with applications in cognitive science, medical science, and social media. Please follow the "research" link above to see some recent projects, and the "publications" link to download publicly available academic papers, data sets, and code.

Current Graduate Students

• Shubham Kumar Bharti received his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur. His research interests include reinforcement learning, machine teaching, fairness and adversarial learning. In his free time, he likes cooking, yoga and hiking.
• Jeremy McMahan received a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from UIUC. His interests include algorithms under uncertainty and the intersection of game theory and machine learning, including multi-agent reinforcement learning and algorithmic mechanism design. In his free time, you can find him on the basketball court, playing guitar, drawing, or too deep in thought about the most random of topics.
• Ara Vartanian's research interests include topological data analysis, active learning, and applications of machine learning to topics in programming languages. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Pomona College, an MBA from the Kelley School of Business, and an MS in Computer Sciences from UW Madison. In his spare time, he tickles the ivories (which is not really ivory, because that would be cruel).

Former Students

PhDs

• Yiding Chen, PhD 2023.
  thesis: Robust Decision-Making under Data Corruption
  first position: Postdoc, Cornell University

• Young Wu, PhD 2023.
  thesis: Attacks and Defense on Normal-Form Games and Markov Games
  first position: Teaching faculty, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Yuzhe Ma, PhD 2021.
  thesis: Adversarial Attacks in Sequential Decision Making and Control
  first position: Microsoft

• Xuezhou Zhang, PhD 2021.
  thesis: Adversarial Learning in Sequential Decision Making
  first position: Assistant Professor, Boston University

• Ayon Sen, PhD 2020.
  thesis: Learning with the Help of a Teacher
  first position: Facebook

• Scott Alfeld, PhD 2017 (co-advised with Paul Barford).
  thesis: Learning in the Presence of Adversaries
  first position: Assistant Professor, Amherst College

• Kwang-Sung Jun, PhD 2015.
  thesis: Some Machine Learning Methods from Sequential Input
  first position: Assistant Professor, University of Arizona

• Junming Sui, PhD 2015.
  thesis: Understanding and Fighting Bullying with Machine Learning
  dataset: Bullying dataset for machine learning version 3.0, 7321 tweets annotated with bullying, author role, teasing, type, form, and emotion labels.
  first position: Google

• Bryan R. Gibson, PhD 2015.
  thesis: Using Machine Learning to Understand and Influence Human Categorization Behavior
  first position: Voxgov

• David M. Andrzejewski, PhD 2010 (co-advised by Mark Craven).
  thesis: Incorporating Domain Knowledge in Latent Topic Models
  first position: Postdoctoral Researcher, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

• Andrew B. Goldberg, PhD 2010.
  thesis: New Directions in Semi-Supervised Learning
  first position: Senior Scientist, Arcode

Masters

• Nick Bridle, MS. (Software Engineer, Google)
• Ohannessian Gorune, MS.
• Lijie Heng, MS. (Software Engineer, Oracle)
• Owen Levin
• Ming Li, Visiting student. (Assistant Professor, Nanjing University)
• Mark Liu, MS.
• Shike Mei, MS. (Facebook)
• Jake Rosin (co-advised by Prof. Chuck Dyer)
• Jurgen Van Gael, MS. (Microsoft Research Cambridge)
• Wei Zhang

Bachelors

• Luke Brandl, BS (Graduate School in CS, University of Michigan)
• Benjamin Burchfiel, BS. (Graduate student in CS, Duke University)
• Alex Furger, BS. (Graduate student in ORFE, Princeton University)
• Evan Hernandez, BS CS+Math. (Google)
• Prasad Kawthekar, BS. (Graduate student in CS, Stanford University)
• Michael Maynord, BS. (Graduate student in CS, University of Maryland)
• Rachael McCormick, BS.
• Ruichen Qian, BS. (Investment Banking Analyst, Morgan Stanley)
• Steve Yazicioglu, BS. (Microsoft)
• Dake Zhang, BS. (CMU)

Information for Prospective Students

PhD Admissions

PhD admissions in our department are done by a committee, who evaluates all applications and makes decisions for the whole department. Individual faculty members do not accept students into their research groups. Sending me an email about your application will not increase your chance of being admitted into the program. You can find all the application information you need online.

Research Assistantships

I am looking for PhD students in CS with a strong mathematical background. If you are already at Wisconsin and want to join my machine learning group, please send me an email. Please note that I rarely hire an incoming student as a research assistant. Most often we will be working together in an independent study course for a semester, so we get a chance to know if we enjoy working with each other.